"This is a typical war of 'mismatched value perception.' The company's efficiency logic and the user's experience expectations are simply not on the same wavelength."
'Spending 830 yuan on a meal that tastes like "leftover pre-made food" — anyone would complain.' In September 2025, a single Weibo post by Luo Yonghao thrust Xibei into the spotlight: five people ordered 13 dishes at Xibei, the lamb ribs had a gamey smell, and the stews were not piping hot; he bluntly called it "expensive and disgusting," and even offered a 100,000-yuan reward for evidence that Xibei uses pre-made dishes.
Xibei's founder Jia Guolong soon responded, in his own words: "our stores have no pre-made dishes; the central kitchen only does raw-material pre-processing, such as portioning lamb ribs and blending sauces, which does not count as pre-made dishes by national standards." He also launched a "Luo Yonghao menu" for consumers to verify and opened the back-of-house of stores nationwide for tours.
Is this uproar really a question of "whether pre-made dishes should be used"? Seeing the essence through the phenomenon: this is a typical war of "mismatched value perception." The company's efficiency logic and the user's experience expectations are simply not on the same wavelength.
01 The Essence of the Quarrel: The Mismatch Between Cost and Experience
Many reduce restaurant competition to "wok-fresh vs. pre-made," but miss a more fundamental logic: what users pay for has never been "wok-fresh" or "pre-made" itself, but a combination of "functional value + emotional value." This is the first principle of the food-service industry: "the money / time a user pays must match the dual expectations of 'practicality (function)' and 'psychological satisfaction (emotion).'"
We can use a table to break down the core differences between these two kinds of value:
More crucially, for different categories of dining, users' expected weighting of "dual-dimensional value" is completely different. For example, when you eat at McDonald's, the default is "convenience first" and you accept 90% pre-made semi-finished products; but when you spend 80 yuan at Xibei, the default is "fresh-made first," and even mere raw-material pre-processing feels "not worth it." This is the "expectation baseline" that category attributes set for users — once this baseline is breached, controversy is bound to erupt.
02 The Pit Xibei Fell Into: Not Using Pre-Made Dishes, but Failing to Match Value Expectations
Xibei's problem has never been "the central kitchen doing raw-material pre-processing," but "charging high-end dine-in prices without meeting the emotional-value expectations of high-end dining" — specifically, it stepped into three pits:
The first pit is the mismatch between category positioning and supply.
Xibei's average spend is 83 yuan (Luo Yonghao's bill), 66% higher than Laoxiangji (50 yuan) in the same trading area and 28% higher than Meizhou Dongpo (65 yuan) — clearly a "high-end dine-in" category. Users of this category pay primarily for "emotional value": for example, the "freshness of wok-cooking" and the "sense of control over ingredients." But Xibei's central kitchen did "portioning lamb ribs and pre-making sauces" without telling users "what share of pre-processing this is" or "whether it affects freshness"; users could only infer "it's pre-made" from details like "the dish isn't hot" or "has a gamey smell," and the emotional value collapsed outright.
The second pit is the lack of transparency.
By contrast, the cleverness of Laoxiangji lies in converting the central kitchen's efficiency advantage into user-perceivable value through transparency. Its "three-color labeling system" launched in 2024 is an industry benchmark: a green tag means made-to-order, a yellow tag means semi-pre-made, and a red tag means reheated pre-made; all stores display a processing-grade sign, and consumers can choose independently by scenario.
Moreover, Laoxiangji has launched real-time live-streaming of its central kitchen and restaurant back-of-house, hoping to drive the food-service industry into a "transparent dining era" through multiple means. According to public information, Laoxiangji has built an integrated full industry chain of "hen farming + food processing + cold-chain delivery + chain operations," achieving end-to-end control of output quality "from farm to table."
Xibei, by contrast, did not open its back-of-house until the controversy erupted, and had not even disclosed its "pre-processing flow" before that: users' fear of the "unknown" is far scarier than "pre-made dishes themselves." Just as pre-made dishes became the "standard answer" for cost-cutting and efficiency in food service, CSC went the opposite way: in 2024 it shut down its Chongqing central factory that had run for years and plastered the red slogan of "wok-fresh cooking" across the open kitchens of its 1,400 directly operated stores nationwide.
The third pit is ignoring users' cognitive bias.
Because of inconsistent standards and bias, consumers think "a restaurant doing raw-material pre-processing = cutting corners = low quality." This bias did not form in a day and requires companies to dissolve it through "education" or "experience." For example, Laoxiangji plays videos of "central-kitchen pre-processing" in its stores, telling users that "portioning ensures every piece of meat is the same size and the texture is more even," whereas Xibei did none of this before — effectively turning users' bias directly into "negative perception."
According to the "2024 Survey on How Young People View Pre-Made Dishes," most young consumers have a generally high acceptance of pre-made dishes, and fewer than one in ten reject them under any circumstance. As mindsets shift, more and more people realize pre-made dishes are not a flood or ferocious beast. The discussion on whether pre-made dishes are acceptable focuses mainly on a few key points: information transparency, safety and hygiene, clear pricing, and decent taste.
Luo Yonghao and Xibei's "feud" and why pre-made dishes stir controversy: everyone is evaluating "the pre-made dishes they imagine." In fact, Xibei's predicament could befall many food-service companies. The key is not "not using pre-made" or "doing all wok-fresh," but building a "value-perception matching model" that aligns the company's efficiency logic with users' experience expectations.
03 The Wok-Fresh Dilemma: The Tangle of Cost and Efficiency
According to the "China Cuisine Association Five-Year (2021–2025) Work Plan," China's current penetration rate of pre-made dishes is only 10%–15%, projected to rise to 15%–20% by 2030. Meanwhile, the penetration rate in the US and Japan has already exceeded 60%, so China's pre-made dish market still has considerable room to grow. This signals the arrival of a social trend: the era of food industrialization!
Consequently, pre-made dishes have in recent years become a hot sector chased by capital, with huge funds pouring in and the industry's development goal explicitly set at "reaching a trillion-yuan scale by 2026." At the same time, as consumers feel somewhat helpless, some restaurants have openly "challenged" capital's fervor: refusing to use pre-made dishes!
Just as pre-made dishes became the "standard answer" for cost-cutting and efficiency in food service, CSC went the opposite way: in 2024 it shut down its Chongqing central factory that had run for years and plastered the red slogan of "wok-fresh cooking" across the open kitchens of its 1,400 directly operated stores nationwide. The biggest challenge of the wok-fresh model lies in balancing standardization and efficiency.
Of course, the earthly warmth of dining and pre-made food under the efficiency revolution are not contradictory. Restaurants have the freedom to choose, and consumers enjoy the right to know and the right to choose.
04 How to Break the Deadlock: The Precise Matching of Value Perception
The Luo Yonghao–Xibei dispute is a warning to all food-service companies: future restaurant competition is not a confrontation between "wok-fresh" and "pre-made," but a contest of "value-perception fit."
First, category positioning determines the baseline of value expectations.
If you are fast food, users accept convenient pre-made; if you are high-end dine-in, users demand fresh-made. Talking about "whether pre-made should be used" outside the category is empty talk. For users, there is no need to "turn pale at the mention of pre-made"; the key is to "choose by scenario": pick "functional-value type" for weekday lunches for convenience, and "emotional-value type" for weekend gatherings for freshness.
Second, transparency is the core transmitter of value.
Users are not afraid of "pre-processing"; they are afraid of "not knowing." A simple label or an open back-of-house works better than ten lines of "we don't use pre-made dishes." Companies should not only think about cutting costs with pre-made dishes; they must let users see the benefits and convert them into value users can perceive.
The Luo Yonghao–Xibei dispute is, in essence, an avoidable "cognitive war." The Laoxiangji case proves: consumers do not resent pre-processing; they resent the sense of being deceived by "buying pre-made at a high price." Food-service companies need not fear transparency; the real risk lies in concealment and misdirection.
Rather than agonizing over "whether to use pre-made," it is better to push on "how to let users consume with full clarity." After all, the ultimate competition in business has always been the precise matching of value perception.
